THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

Wow! Seems I'm jumping on the, "Let's review Spock's Beard today" bandwagon. I just so happened to be listening to this album and figured it needed to be review. Anyho, I haven't listened to this disc in a while and not being the biggest Beard fan, I was pleasantly surprised how many good songs are on it. The three tracks I really enjoy are, "In The Mouth Of Madness" which is a very rocking prog song by the Beards with your typical Gentle Giant keyboard noodling that permeates much of this album, in a good way mind you, although the one thing that bothers me about this band is how they'll use the Gentle Giant-like weirdness and use it sparingly, usually in the beginning then abandoning the beat for a more pedestrian groove. Irks me to no end. But this song is a strong one with nice guitar and keyboard work. My second favorite is "Harm's Way" which has the most proginess tendencies, also with the Gentle Giantish keyboards. But, for me, the best is the last track, "Flow" which is in three parts. What I like about this track is the theme in the beginning, a very sad guitar melody that shows up towards the end with Ryo's ever so awesome Mellotron backing it up but also keeping up with the beat. Extremely beautiful, maybe their most haunting track ever. As usual, their middle tracks are popish and don't do much for me, especially when I have to hear Neal's constent acscentuating of the last word of each line with that 'preacher's preaching' warble. Also irks me to no end. So to put it bluntly, the album is bookmarked with 5 star tracks, stuffed with two star duds. Rounding it off, I'd give this a solid 3.75 which pushes it up to 4 stars for the Beards this go around. Good place to start for the newbies.